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We need to start porting some of the old BBS game classics to the web. I know that some of this was done in an ad-hoc fashion, but perhaps we could do a big emulator that would let the original binaries run?
Just a thought. I would love to login to tribe and be able to play space dynasty for example.
Just a thought. I would love to login to tribe and be able to play space dynasty for example.
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SF Bay Area
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Tue, July 19, 2005 - 11:45 PMI see a few emulators out there that could emulate DOS: DOSBox, Bochs, and perhaps Doscmd.
Has anyone used any of these? I've certainly used DOSBox for playing old games. I guess we just need to figure out how to properly redirect the IO to whatever login shell or other server process, and it should pretty much work... Hopefully.
How did those old doors handle user accounts, did the caller just pass in command line arguments or set environment variables for the current user or something? There's so much dust on this knowledge.
I think I'll download some binaries and try 'em out in DOSBox.
Would there be any good way to convert the BBS shell style interface to web? Or is there some way to hookup some common browser plugin (flash/shockwave?) to operate in an interactive shell mode? Would be neat to have a nostalgic 16 color or monochrome rendered font. Then of course the icing on the cake would be to frame it in a monitor-looking window labeled "Compy 386". -
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Thu, July 21, 2005 - 6:02 PMThere's a bbs out there called synchronet. You can telnet to it, I think you can even dial into it, and it also has a web interface. We were playing global war on it for a while. We even set one up for a bit. We're currently trying to set up a new sychnronet bbs and get it to interface with our website's phpbb forums, and tie synchronet into some of the old echo's which are still alive, and exchange messages that way. We have it partially working at the moment, but the guy who wrote the interface apparently stopped developing it and doesn't support it, so we're trying to figure it out. If you'd like to see synchronet, I believe the telnet address is: vert.synchronet.com, and you can download a copy of it from there I believe. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask, and I'll pass them along to the guy setting it up for our stuff. -
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Wed, January 18, 2006 - 10:24 PMMy friend Greg runs a synch bbs.. if I recall right he has a ton of add-on files for it in the file libs there. thorny.synchro.net is the telnet address :) Has a bunch of games on his site including a tw game.
embers
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Thu, July 21, 2005 - 6:45 PMProbably the best bet is to set up a telnet BBS and run doors off of the BBS software that way. On the client side, the way to integrate with the WWW would be to simply embed a Java telnet client in the web page. (With a Compy 386 frame around it of course.)
As for how the user was identified -- I think both environment variables and command line parameters were used depending on the game and BBS, but don't remember for sure.
After looking at the DOSBox network interface stuff, it looks like you might be able to actually run a legacy single-user BBS over Telnet, using the DOSBox "Virtual COM Port" emulation! Of course something like Synchronet which was actually designed for this might be better (for some definitions of the word).
You still got that TradeWars license key? -
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Fri, July 22, 2005 - 8:34 PMI actually sent those clowns who wrote Tradewars a check to register the game. It was in US dollars, drawn on a Canadian account (I live in Canada). They wouldn't accept it. Go figure. I ran a pirated copy of their game after that. -
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Re: Porting old BBS games
Wed, January 18, 2006 - 1:18 AMHeh. I am running a twgs from my home pc. As soon as I build my next rig I'll be banging more games and setting up a bbs on the current machine.
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